TheSnackHound

The naive tot that I was, I was not formally introduced to guacamole and guacamole dip recipes until I started taking Spanish class in the eighth grade. Up until then, I thought a scoop of guacamole in a dish was perhaps some strange warm derivative of pistachio ice cream and was afraid to try it, even though no self respecting kid could ever pass up a dip. Yeah, I was just either a little insane or far too picky about squishy green foods when I was a wee one. Now, I know I was really missing out.

The principles of guacamole dip are really simple.

1) Buy Avacados. make sure that they are a bit ripe.
2) Cut them in half. Scoop out the innards with an ice cream scoop.
3) Put the seed on a paper towel in a cup until it sprouts. Plant it in the ground but only if you live in Florida, California or the Carolinas.

To make a guacamole dip that tastes like anything, you have a few alternatives. Stir in a half a cup of pre-made or store bought salsa. For the more adventurous, try starting with freshly mashed avocado innards from 2 avocados, then sprinkle 1 tsp of chili powder, a smattering of slivered celery, a bit of diced onions and a tbsp of lemon juice.

If you don’t like avocados or want a fat free version, Recipe4Living suggests substituting 2 cups of split green peas and a bit of Tabasco sauce. Well…you may not want to go fat free with this recipe as you eliminate all the benefits of the HEALTHY fats in avocados which eliminates the entire point of even eating the dip. I should be fair and try it before casting judgement, but why not just skip the Tabasco and slap a picture of a baby on the the jar at that point? If it is your very, very favorite version, write in or call in and set me straight. I’d love to hear your side of the story.

Here is a very simple recipe that an eight year old should be able to make by themselves. However, because it is so simple, there are many ways for someone who over thinks things, such as myself, to make mush out of it.

Here is the premise:

Ingredients List:
1 Cup Sugar
1 Cup Peanut Butter
1 Egg

Mix the three ingredients in a bowl. With a spoon or whisk.

(Aside #1: Now, this is where the recipe went south for me once. I successfully cracked the egg and measured out very level and accurate one cup portions of the other 2/3 of the ingredients. Where I erred, is that I thoroughly mixed the egg and peanut butter. After I created he promising mix, I realized that my chemistry was off. I should have started with the egg and sugar.

What resulted, were dough balls that were reminiscent of gumdrops, with the sugar as the exoskeleton. A slightly gritty consistency. Okay…back to the recipe.)

Now, divide the portions up into 8-12 portions, depending on how large you would like to make the cookies. Although, I might add, nothing is stopping you from making one huge cookie. Place them on a cookie sheet.

I forgot to add that you need to preheat the oven or the toaster for this. DO NOT USE THE MICROWAVE. (I will say it again. Just don’t do it.) I *think* you would want to set the temperature at 350 or 450, but I really don’t remember. If you are used to baking, you will know what temperature it is supposed to be on.

(Aside number #2: A common mistake is to bake at the wrong temperature. Unless you check them every five seconds. They can quickly turn from mush to crispy in an instant so be careful.)

When they are all baked, take them out to cool.

(Aside number #3: I have to admit that half the time, the cookies turn out soggy and half the time they turn out like a hockey puck. There is a fine balance between leaving them very soft knowing that they will continue to bake on the inside while they cool, and taking them out too soon and basically eating peanut butter with raw egg drippings on it)

If my luck is on your side, you will get 5 really nice cookies out of these, 1 unfit for consumption, and 6 others that you would never serve, but you eat yourself out of mercy. You don’t want to waste food, after all.

Look on the bright side: It is a great way to fill up Grandma’s cookie platter and add the inviting smell of fresh baked cookies to your home.  Buy a cookie dough scented candle to cover up the evidence.

Here’s a recipe from archives, reprinted by popular demand.  Halloween is a little more than half a hot potato toss away, but around here, pumpkins have petered out. Some are just stunted and are maturing at a shrunken size. Oh well, there will be more Golden Snitch pumpkins and less Herman Munsters. One thing you can do with leftover pumpkin guts is to make pumpkin muffins.

You will need:

The innards of your pumpkin
4 eggs
1 2/3 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1 cup oil
1 (16 oz) can pumpkin
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda

Combine baking powder, flour, salt, and baking soda in a mixing bowl. Take another mixing bowl and combine and beat egg, canned pumpkin, sugar and oil until fully mixed and when it starts to get a little fluffy. What does fluffy mean? When it is not a big gloppy heavy mess. Then, you combine all together. Put the combination in muffin tins. This is the same recipe for pumpkin bars, but you are making it in muffin tins so people will think it is a whole new recipe.

Now, it comes time for the the pumpkin guts. First, clean your spatula and whisks thorughly. Then, take some pumpkin innards and spread it on the spatula and the beaters. Leave on the counter or return to a dry sink. Put a few little pumpkin innard droplets here and there on a cutting board or a little on the oven. Throw the rest away. Afterall, the pumpkins we carve are not good pumpkins for pies or desserts. It is pretty flavorless. The smaller pumpkin varieties are the most flavorful and are what are used for pies and recipes.

Take the muffins out to cool after you have baked them on 350 degrees. Optionally, you can put frosting on them if you like.

Invite people over and make sure they come through the kitchen. Make a big deal out of forgetting to wash out your spatulas, etc. Make sure they see them and comment on how valiantly you wrestled that Jack-o-Lantern and how proud Martha would have been that you used up all the pumpkin innards. The muffins came out perfect. They weren’t spongey or mushy at all!

Honestly, I am not that big on cookies.  Lately, most people have been making them with gooey fruit in the middle or they are crusty and crispy like pastries.  My cookies need to be chocolatey and easy to eat without leaving a trail of crunchy combustibles.  My “go to” “fake it and bake it” style cookie is Chocolate Chip Devil’s Food cookies.  They are super simple to make, unlike my last “fake it and make it” recipe which called for so much prep time making homemade mousse to make a boxed cake look homemade.

1 Devil’s Food Cake Mix
1/2 cup vegetable or canola oil
2 eggs (not hard boiled or Cadbury)
1/2 cup to 3 cups of semi-sweet or dark chocolate chips.

1) First, make sure that you have at least 2 eggs in the fridge.  You’ll need vegetable oil too, but you probably bought it 6 months ago and forgot it was there.

1) Go to the store and get a Super Moist Devil’s Foodcake cake mix.  This can be any brand that you want to get or is on sale.  Then come home.

2) Pour 1/2 cup of vegetable or canola oil in a bowl.  Get the eggs out of the fridge. Notice that they are now gone. Someone is home that is not normally home at this time and decided to make themselves scrambled eggs because there were “just two eggs in there and didn’t want to waste them.”  Root around in the cupboards for Egg Beaters.  Turn up empty.  Go back to the store.  Get more than two eggs.  Trust me, don’t use just one. You will make some pretty mean hockey pucks that way, but they’ll also be a powdery mess.

3) Crack the eggs and put only the contents of 2 eggs in the bowl with the vegetable oil.  Make sure the eggs are broken and everything is mixed in evenly.

4) Slowly pour the cake mix in the bowl with the other two things. But actually there are three things because there are 2 eggs.  Oh yeah, since they are scrambled up, its just one mass of egg innards.  Appetizing, huh?  Do this gradually.  I made the mistake of plopping the whole thing in there and then mixing it is like mixing cement.

5) Mix contents with a hand mixer, unless you are a really fancy person and have a stand mixer and you put flame decals on it or decalse of a B-52 Bomber on it.

6) Once everything is thoroughly mixed up, portion them out into balls on a cookie sheet.  I heard this recipe is supposed to make 24-36 cookies.  There is just NO WAY.  You are lucky to get 24.  I actually only got 20 cookies.  Because I ate them.  DO NOT eat the raw cookie dough. You can do it with peanut butter cookies but don’t do it with these.  It’s runny and soft and has raw eggs in it…unless you buy the pasteurized kind that are for Caesar Salads.  Then its okay.  But it might feel weird.

7) Bake for 10-12 minutes at 350 degrees.  The cookies won’t look done, but they are.  No hockey pucks, people! Unless you really want them that way.

You want pictures?  Sorry. I ate them all.  Not all at once.  I assure you, it was in moderation.

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of HealthyTuna.com. All opinions are 100% mine.

Lately, I have been pondering about how healthy tuna and other fish is for my diet. By diet, I don’t mean that I am on a diet. Oh yeah. The See Food Diet. I see food. I eat it. It is not really that bad. I really have only fluxuated five pounds since high school. You can hate me for that, but then again, I didn’t tell you how much I weighed in high school, did?

There is much flap about mercury in seafood, but in fact, the tuna that is labeled “light” is actually not tuna at all. Occasionally it is yellowfin rather than albacore. At any rate, actual tuna is safer than long lived large fish such as shark and sword fish. It has been found, that if there is risk, the benefits outweigh the possibility. Removing Omega 3 fatty acids provided by oily fish puts a damper on skin and brain health. I know from my own experience that when a lot of fish was removed from my diet due to circumstance rather than conscious choice, skin issues resurfaced. Sure, there are Omega 3 acids in flax oil, but I did not receive nearly the same results.

When I was a kid, I hated tuna. The main reason was because my mom slathered it with mayonnaise.

Here is a recipe for tuna salad without the icky white stuff.

3 celery stalks
2 cans of tuna
Ground black paper to taste
1 tablespoon sweet pickle juice
1 1/2 cups pickles, bread and butter style.
5 eggs.

Hard boil and peel the eggs.
Chop eggs and pickles in the food processor.
In a medium bowl, combine mush made in the food processor with tuna and celery, gently folding everything in.
Add pepper to taste.
Stir in pickle juice.

Now, don’t get carried away with the food processor.  This isn’t the Bass-O-Matic.  You just want to chop everything up just a little bit.  We aren’t going for Tuna Puree.  If you want, you can get out some crumpets or put it on crackers.  I really haven’t seen too many crumpets on this side of the pond, but I am just saying that its possible as its much more hoity-toity looking than plain old mayo, tuna and pepper.

I think I have stumbled on the best chocolate frosting ever.  Why is it the best?  Firstly, it is dark chocolate.  Secondly, I CANNOT SCREW IT UP.  I sincerely thought that this could not be possible.  If a recipe is simple and mindless, I am bound to screw it up.  So much can happen.  I can start pouring cups of something in and lose count.  The phone could ring.  I could also suddenly think that I really miss the seafood in Boston.  Another thing that could happen was like what happened last night.

Me (standing with a packet of chocolate chips in my hand):   (My brain thinks: Okay.  I put 2 cups of chocolate chips in a bowl, but I actually say:)  I found this tape at my parents house.  I think I taped War of the Worlds, the radio show, on one side.   On the other, I think I have a tape where I put the tape recorder up to the phone.  I called this number when I was in 6th grade where you could listen to the noise that a satellite picked up inside a comet’s tail.

My Favorite Guy: That answers my question, then.  There IS sound in a vacuum.

Me (eats some chocolate chips. Of course, now there are less than 2 cups of chocolate chips in the bag): So the whooshing noise wasn’t just the satellite then?

Luckily, this recipe can be made with less than 2 cups of chocolate chips as long as the ratio is the same.

Basically, here it is:

Chocolate Ganache Frosting:

2 cups bittersweet or dark chocolate chips
2 cups heavy whipping cream

Place chocolate in a mixing bowl and set aside.

Place 2 cups of heavy whipping cream in a sauce pan and when it starts to boil, take it off the burner.  Oh yes, I forgot to tell you that you are supposed to put the saucepan on the burner and also turn the stove on.  I just thought that was assumed. But since people have to write on the Potato Buds box that the plate the spuds are shown on and the family around the table are not included, then I guess I have to be a little more explicit.

After you turn the stove OFF and take the sauce pan off the burner, slowly pour the hot whipping cream over the chocolate chips.  Stir the mixture as you pour it on.  Stir the chocolate and cream until the chocolate melts (NOT on the stove, it is just melting from the heat of the whipping cream.)  Stir with a spatula until it becomes smooth.

Let the brand new concoction cool to room temperature.   Once it has cooled, take out your electric mixer.  Put the beaters in (sorry if I am being remedial, but this is for the Potato Buds or the Healthy Choice frozen entree people like me), and turn the mixer on.  Wait, plug it in first.  Okay.  You got it.

Now,  mix the mixture until it starts to stiffen or ripple ever so slightly.  Be careful.  You don’t want it as stiff as when you beat straight whipping cream, so it won’t break. The aim is to put some air in it, so you have the consistency of a frosting rather than a drizzly

After it thickens slightly, spread it on an already cool cake.  Unlike pouring the ganache straight onto the cake before beating, it will have the consistency of a frosting rather the drippiness of a pre-cooled ganache.  Of course, pre cooled ganache is awesome for dipping strawberries in.  I even made a cake where I poured it on and the cake came out looking like a giant Ding Dong when it cooled off in the fridge.  Of course, I had to cut around and get off all the extra chocolate blobs all over the plate.  It kind of stinks to do with a bundt cake because it seeps in through the hole in the middle and you can’t exactly scoop it out of the middle with a knife.  You end up screwing up the ganache that is SUPPOSED to be there.  You usually do have leftover frosting, but by that time, it has thickened so patching holes just looks like you took a wall and filled a spot with that foam stuff in a can and it just got all bumpy and nasty.

With that lovely image of spray foam in cake, which is certainly quite toxic, you can serve the cake in smooth ganache form an hour after ganaching and the cake that you spread the frosting with air in it approximately 30 minutes after frosting.

Enjoy.